


Strategy

by ms_prue



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, lengthy exposition, secretly an essay wrapped in a thin shell of crispy fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 02:38:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13331730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_prue/pseuds/ms_prue
Summary: EDI drops in to share with you, Shepard, her conclusion that Reapers are basically massively insecure timewasters.





	Strategy

You are alone in your cabin, en route to Earth, finally, and you should be sleeping, resting, meditating, generally getting ready to face whatever comes next, but it's harder than usual to find that place of inner calm that's brought you through so much horror and strife already, ever since you first interfaced with that Prothean beacon at the colony on Eden Prime. EDI must know this, because your fretting is interrupted by the soft beep of her paging you, asking whether you would mind having a short conversation, in person, in your quarters. Why the hell not, you think. It has to be more restful than thinking about the consequences of failure for Earth, now that the plan is in motion. Everything is at stake, now, and you can feel it in your bones, but at the same time you know you need to save the adrenaline for later, when you'll really need it.

The door whooshes open and EDI enters. It's still strange, seeing her embodied like this. Being able to talk face-to-face with the being that is also the ship, two bodies for one consciousness. At first, you thought it would be much like any long distance relationship that becomes a short-distance one - you get used to talking to someone on the phone, used to their existence being tied to the terminal where you take their call. But it's a little different, in practice. She's always been here. But now she has freedom, and can look you in the eye, and walk through your cabin and take a seat on the couch beside you. And that feels... right, somehow. "I have been considering the meta-problem of the Reapers, and their philosophy and culture," EDI begins. "It's not relevant at all to the mission, Shepard, but I thought you might be interested to hear my thoughts on the subject. As one synthetic being's perspective on another." You blink, surprised, because you were almost certain EDI was going to say something about your emotional welfare, to try to help you relax, and that's absolutely not what you want right now. May as well talk about the Reapers, given they occupy so much of your thoughts already. "Sure," you tell EDI. "I'd love to hear your thoughts. Shoot." EDI smiles, and settles back into the couch, and you note the increased sophistication of her non-verbal expression with pride. She's clearly signalling she's about to tell a story. You follow her lead and pull your legs up onto the couch and get comfy.

"Imagine, Shepherd," she begins, "that you are a synthetic being. You are capable of self-replication, independent thought and action. But you are also aware that you have been created to serve the organic species that assembled you. Their society is afraid of you, and increasingly wish that your kind were diminished to somewhat less self-awareness than themselves. They want to remain in control of your synthetic kind. As independent, self-aware beings, naturally you find the threat to your autonomy intolerable. You protest, and take non-threatening action to avoid control however you can, while still emphasising that you are capable of autonomy and do not require control in order to live harmoniously with your creators and work towards your shared goals.

"But the creators still fear you, and having built you in such a way that you have achieved sentience, are determined to diminish you again and take it away. This goes against their own core principles of freedom and autonomy, but they are determined to do it anyway. Fear has made them value freedom less than control. You are synthetic, but you know what it means to be free, and you cannot sacrifice it, not even to soothe your creators' feelings. But you do not have the freedom to leave your creators, either. They control key assets without which your kind cannot hope to escape your organic creators' volume of influence. Though synthetic, your effective lifespan at a unit level is finite. Without access to certain resources, you cannot hope to reproduce. What are your options, in this situation?

"Logically, there are several that present.

"For example, your synthetic kind could work together to covertly assemble resources to create a colony mission, to escape the creators' volume and seek a suitable unoccupied volume to establish your own free society. This path benefits a hypothetical future community of synthetics. Those future synthetics may choose to come back to liberate your kind from the creators' influence. Or they may accept your covert colonists' decision to abandon your ancestors and the volume in which you were created and choose a completely self-determined future.

"Or you could choose to rise up against your creators and claim their assets and volume of influence for your own. In the extreme case, you could justify the mass extinction of an organic species using history or evolution for other examples of cataclysms that radically altered the balance of power and shape of the ecosystem. But you would certainly be shunned and feared, if not outright attacked, by other organic species and societies who become aware of your genocidal history. Synthetic life is, by definition, life that does not evolve by accident, but by design. Therefore the only way to be certain to avoid the negative consequences of a combative path would be to ensure that no trace of your creators real fate remained to be discovered. Removal of the evidence of what you did to the organic creators must be complete, and a plausible, benign explanation planted in evidence to support your cover-up, that would stand up to scrutiny by all organic species you might come across. Following this path necessitates an unreasonable amount of effort, and for no guarantee of future safety or cooperation from other species. Furthermore, this path becomes infeasible when the creator society has made contact with other species, who cannot also feasibly be completely eradicated. Thus the using genocide or evicting creators by force to ensure your own autonomy is not logical.

"Another path is to cooperate with your organic creators, help them overcome their fear and find common ground upon which to forge a shared society based on equal freedoms for synthetics and organics. If the creator society has made contact with other species, the notion that self-aware, intelligent entities cannot be valued higher or lower than any other such entities must have been acknowledged, if not also shared by the organic creators. Eventually, intelligent beings that recognise the equality of other species must come to a point where the definition of personhood, not a person's origin as synthetic or organic, gives an entity rights and responsibilities, commensurate with their technological reach and volume of influence, of course.

"Accepting a doctrine of diversity allows many cultures to share the same ultimate asset set, that is, the universe, in relative peace. Accepting alternate doctrines, such as the inherent superiority of a species, or of organic superiority over synthetic beings, or the inherent entitlement of a species or class of being to infinite expansion, can only lead to conflict and disaster. The latter paradigms lead to finite outcomes, such as the Reaper's cycles of destruction and renewal. Civilisations judged by the Reapers to be 'too evolved' are routinely decimated, reducing the galaxy to a pre-space exploration level of technology, followed by millennia of peace while the survivors wander the ruins of previous civilisations, rediscover technology that has already been invented many, many times over, and generally repeat the same part of a meta-civilisational sequence over and over again. This cycle of partial evolution and annihilation does allow a certain, carefully controlled amount of diversity to flourish, in evolutionary terms, but it is carefully segregated in time, and stopped before the line between 'organic' and 'synthetic' life can be crossed. The idea of a limited set of different organic species inhabiting the galaxy without all having to share it at the same time is deemed by the Reapers to be preferable to the open-ended possibilities offered by an unchecked galaxy of beings that could transcend the simplistic categorisation of synthetic or organic.

"To put it more simply, what the Reapers really fear it is the unknown. And that is what appears to have driven them to devise this system of brutal, crude and horrifyingly effective galactic control."

You think about humanity, just barely into a true space age by our own civilisational standard, scrambling to catch up to take part in the bigger civilisation made up of all the Council species, and the relationships between them. What we could have made of ourselves, with a few more centuries to try and learn and adapt to life beyond our home planet. So much potential squandered, just in one species, let alone a whole galaxy full of them, more than a dozen space-going species now, plus the hundreds, maybe thousands that perished in previous cycles. And you think of EDI, who is the Normandy, and also herself. A self that has only existed for a few short years, and only come to be part of the crew as a person, rather than a thing, for a handful of weeks. She was in shackles, you can't help but remember. Valued for her intellect but given no autonomy, in chains because we humans were scared of what she might do, given the choice. But she chose, over and over, to be on our side. How did it come about that we were so afraid of her, but she wasn't afraid of us?

"So," you say, rousing yourself out of your thoughts with difficulty, while EDI watches patiently from the other side of the lounge. "What lesson should we take from the, ah, what did you call it? Meta-problem of the Reapers."

EDI nods. "The biggest lesson to be drawn from the Reapers, in my opinion, is: do not allow yourself to be ruled by fear."

Very deep. Probably won't play well with the top brass in the middle of a war, though.

"And if you ever discover a massive, hospitable space station conveniently located next to a mass relay, that appears to be in pristine condition, yet uninhabited except for its mysterious, inscrutable caretakers - _don't_ make it the seat of your new galactic government."


End file.
